Identical twins Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania, who were separated at birth, discovered each other through a viral TikTok video which helped them reunite after years.
According to BBC, their story highlights a far bigger problem that Georgia is facing, the startling number of infants that have been taken from hospitals and sold over the years, a scandal that is still mostly unsolved.
The journey to discovery for Amy and Ano began when the former was watching the TV programme "Georgia’s Got Talent" and saw someone looking similar to her.
She found it weird and asked her mom about it, but after not receiving any solid reply, she let it be.
Seven years later, in 2021, Amy posted a video of herself on TikTok with blue hair and pierced eyebrows.
Ano, 19, who was living in Tbilisi, was sent that video by her friend. She thought it was "cool that she looks like me". She tried to trace the girl and after a couple of days, both the girls discovered they weren’t just similar-looking but were in fact, sisters.
They later found out that their mother, Aza Shoni, had fallen into a coma after their birth in 2002, and her husband had sold the twins to different families.
The case of Amy and Ano sheds light on the horrifying situation of baby trafficking in Georgia. Although the government has tightened laws to make illegal baby adoption difficult, it is still very prevalent.
In 2021, journalist Tamuna Museridze formed the Facebook group "Vedzeb" to find her own family, but the group ended up exposing a baby trafficking scandal affecting tens of thousands of people and spanning decades.
She believes it was run by organised criminals and involved people from all sections of society, from taxi drivers to people high up in the government. Corrupt officials would fake the documents needed for the illegal adoptions.
"The scale is unimaginable; up to 100,000 babies were stolen. It was systemic," she said.
Tamuna joined forces with human rights lawyer Lia Mukhashavria to take these cases to the courts, hoping this would help lay ghosts to rest. They want the right to access their birth documents which is currently not possible under Georgian law.
"I always felt like there was something or someone missing in my life," said Ano. "I used to dream about a little girl in black who would follow me around and ask me about my day."
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